


Sometimes all you can do is burn (why won't the fire go out)

by In_this_life_and_the_next



Category: Glee
Genre: Alcohol, Angst, F/F, McKinley High Cheerios, Post-Season/Series 01, Quinn Fabray-centric, Quinn clearly has depression, Quinn deserved more storylines after season 1, Quinn gives up her baby and can't forget, Quinn goes to stay with santana after she's kicked out, Quinn is addicted to running because she's so very angry and upset and sad, Rewrite of season 2, Santana and Brittany are the only ones who are there for Quinn, This is a sad Quinn think peice about what i wish season 2 had included ok, Trauma, Why does no one mention beth again after season 1, also Quinn's parents suck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-10
Updated: 2020-04-10
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:26:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23576878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/In_this_life_and_the_next/pseuds/In_this_life_and_the_next
Summary: Staying at Santana’s was impossible. It was too full of love. Too understanding. Too much of that baby was in that house. Where she had grown. Where Quinn had fallen in love with her.There was no love at this house. And maybe that’s what Quinn wanted. Space to self-destruct.Quinn destroyed her room a few weeks after getting back from the hospital. Throwing all those photos of who she had been before in a box. Moving all her furniture into the hall as she spread old tarps across the floor and single-handedly repainted the walls with an unmatched fury.She chose a bright and screaming pink.
Relationships: Beth Corcoran & Quinn Fabray, Santana Lopez/Brittany S. Pierce
Comments: 4
Kudos: 30





	Sometimes all you can do is burn (why won't the fire go out)

Santana was worried about Quinn. But who wouldn’t be after a year like that?

Quinn had packed her bags and moved back in with her mum a few weeks after she gave her daughter up.

Quinn didn’t mention it… but Santana thought it might be because she couldn’t stay in Santana’s house without thinking about Beth constantly.

Quinn couldn’t continue to sleep in that room without her. That room where her baby had grown under her fingertips and for a brief, shining window of hope it just seemed like everything might be ok.

It had been so bright, those few months where it seemed like the sky would never be dark again. Sure Quinn had still been 16 and pregnant… but she had been in a loving home and she hadn’t yet decided what was coming. Hadn’t yet laid that last stone to rest at the grave of the future where she kept her daughter.

But she was just too young. It was just too much. She couldn’t look after a real, actual baby. She couldn’t force the burden on Santana’s parents. She couldn’t break it. Ruin a real actual person’s childhood. She couldn’t.

But even when she knew, when she lay awake at night in the room made up just for her… she had let herself think about it. Hope. Just for those few secluded hours between the sun going down and the sun coming up. When sleep was hard to find in a body that had changed too much to be comfortable. When it was so ungainly and heavy and the weight of her baby kept her up. Kept her thinking. As she drew gentle circles on the stretched skin of her stomach and couldn’t stop feeling the baby’s little feet kick under her hands.

That this wouldn’t end soon. That they would always be together. That this wasn’t just the one intersecting moment between their lives.

But that was over.

Quinn was alone again. Worse… she was empty like she had never been before. Like a big, gaping, bleeding hole had been punched right through her.

And she was back in that house. The one she had lived in a totally different life. One that was so far removed from who Quinn was now… it was like walking into a home that you had seen burnt to the ground and finding everything utterly untouched.

Quinn was still scarred and burning from that fire. Even if no one else seemed to be. Even if her mother… was still so cool and unattached. It was like the last year hadn’t even happened. Like Quinn had simply gone on holiday or been away at summer camp.

Not like Quinn had gotten pregnant, been kicked out, given birth to her daughter, given her up… and then returned to the home that had so mistreated her.

Sure her father wasn’t there anymore. But Quinn felt his presence in the halls.

In her room that was like a mausoleum. It had been left totally untouched. Just the same as when Quinn had left it that night, in a desperate rush.

The same pictures on the wall. The same spare Cheerio’s uniform in the closet. The same crooked blankets on her bed. The same products abandoned in her bathroom… like It had only been a few days.

Quinn felt like her brain was short circuiting entering that room. Staring up at the walls of a very different Quinn Fabray.

And Quinn was broken.

Staying at Santana’s was impossible. It was too full of love. Too understanding. Too much. Too much of that baby was in that house. Where she had grown. Where Quinn had fallen in love with her.

There was no love at this house. And maybe that’s what Quinn wanted. Space to self-destruct.

Quinn destroyed her room a few weeks after getting back from the hospital. Throwing all those photos of who she had been before in a box. Moving all her furniture into the hall as she spread old tarps across the floor and single-handedly repainted the walls with an unmatched fury.

She chose a bright and screaming pink.

Her mother had given her a new credit card without saying a word.

Before Quinn had nothing, no money of her own and no mother with a baby growing inside her.

Now she had a huge gaping hole inside of her, more money than she knew what to do with and her mother lived right across the hall.

Quinn didn’t thank her mother. She just took the card and set her old world on fire.

Santana refused to leave Quinn alone. She helped her paint the room. Doing the delicate window sill in white with steady hands that had none of Quinn’s anger. Quinn painted the walls as paint splattered aggressively up her arms.

Santana didn’t make Quinn talk. Quinn didn’t want to. Couldn’t say anything without screaming for hours. So she was quiet. Kept that storm inside where it burned in her eyes and dripped from her teeth.

Brittany started running with Quinn. Ready at the drop of a hat.

Brittany was all legs, all endless wind and grace and power.

Quinn was shorter, all fury and burning and out of breath. Feeling the chubby rolls of skin under her shorts break her heart. Running harder and faster and longer. Trying to turn back time. If only on the outside.

Santana’s parents would be there for Quinn till the day they died. They dropped off dinners, had stern words to an empty headed Judy Fabray and took Quinn out.

Marco took Quinn driving. All steady and calm, an endlessly reassuring presence that checked her skills and gently corrected her mistakes. Leading her though the practice needed before she could get her full license.

Rosa took Quinn to breakfast, lunch or dinner. Always somewhere new and nice and far away. Never pushing her to talk, but always being there. Santana came with them sometimes. Brittany too. But sometimes it was just her and Quinn. Sitting in a café on a rainy day quietly drinking hot chocolate and splitting a pastry. Sometimes that was enough to cool the storm in Quinn’s head.

To not think about who was missing. Who might be sitting beside them in another life.

They went shopping and Quinn brought a second hand new leather jacket. Her mother barely batted an eye. Rosa smiled and gave Quinn a hug that meant a heck of a lot more than approval of her new fashion choices.

Quinn might not be staying with them anymore, unable to bear the house she had filled with memories of her daughter, but they would never abandon her. They would never stop looking after her, even after her bags were packed. They would drive across town as often as it took to convince Quinn that they always planned on being around.

That they had meant it when they said they would be there for her no matter what.

Quinn returned from Santana’s family to an echoing house. To a mother that was always one glass or more deep into a bottle of wine.

She needed the quiet.

She also knew how to pick the locks of the alcohol cabinet.

Quinn re-joined the Cheerio’s when the next year started, but it was not the same Quinn that had once been head cheerleader.

She didn’t sell out Santana, she could never.

It also helped that Quinn truly, in all honesty, didn’t really care that much. She wasn’t doing it for a sneaky power grab. She wasn’t trying to climb back to her old stop on top of a pedestal.

Quinn honestly just wanted a fair bit of exhaustion. A fair bit of pain. A reason to stand shaking in the rain holding up half the body weight of the cheerleader above her. A reason for her muscles to ache and burn. A reason behind the anger in her eyes.

Maybe Coach Sylvester could see that too. That disquiet rage. The silent storm in Quinn’s head. Because Quinn didn’t grovel for a place on the pyramid. She didn’t sell anyone out.

Coach Sylvester saw a very different Cheerleader audition for the missing spot on her team and… for some reason… let it slide. Let her in.

Quinn didn’t thank her. She simply arrived at practice without another word and a look on her face that dared anyone to question her. She might not be head cheerio anymore… but Quinn still had the same teeth and claws that had earned her that spot.

It was only days into the new school term when Karofsky made a sneering, leering, demeaning comment about her… about Beth. About the bastard child she couldn’t wait to give up.

And Quinn did _not_ let it slide.

Santana had never seen Quinn like that before.

She was so fast slamming her wrist against Karofsky’s throat, he was completely taken aback as he was slammed against the lockers.

Quinn didn’t have the strength to hold him back forever, or at all. But she did have long, sharp nails digging right into his jugular. And she let them dig. Her face a snarl.

“You don’t get to talk about her like that.”

She raised that eyebrow that had sent men scampering out of her sight a hundred times and a hundred times again. She smiled, a dangerous thing, and said in a much softer voice, her nails digging harder and harder with each passing second, “You will regret it, I assure you.”

Her nails didn’t break his skin but it was a close thing. Karofsky didn’t even have time to choke out a reply before Quinn had turned away, her hair whipping past his face.

People didn’t mention her _bastard child_ after that. Not to her face anyway. Not unless they wanted to experience first-hand just how cold Quinn’s eyes could get. Just how little she could care. Just how sharp her nails were and how hard she could slap.

One skill Quinn had learned when she was pregnant after she was kicked out, was the ability to pick locks.

Santana and Brittany had gone with her, on a weekend morning when she knew her parents would be out at the country club.

They’d been practicing for weeks at that point, on the doors of Santana’s home and every spare break at school on the locked supply closets.

Quinn had totally run out of fucks to give at that point, she had been almost 5 months pregnant and it had really sunk in just how different life was outside of the Fabray manor house.

She had left _a lot_ of very important documents she absolutely needed in her new, independent life. Santana had decided it was better to act quicker rather than slower in case her father went on a _burn Quinn out of the family records_ rampage.

Brittany made a good lookout as Santana and Quinn used their improvised lock picks to break into the back entrance of Quinn’s old home. It had taken them a few genuinely terrifying minutes to make the lock _click_ open. They had ushered themselves inside as quietly as they could.

They had made short work of it, Santana and Brittany carrying all of Quinn’s abandoned possessions as they raced around the empty house trying to leave as little traces as possible.

Quinn got to work unlocking the door to her father’s office while Santana and Brittany carefully ransacked her old bedroom. Quinn only had 30 minutes to pack all those weeks ago… she had left a lot behind her haste, as the cut across her cheek dribbled blood onto the carpet.

As soon as Quinn fished her passport out of her father’s file cabinet she made her way to leave. But something made her hesitate as she was about to cross the threshold. She turned back to her father’s desk with a very cold feeling in her chest and a hard look in her eyes.

Money. She is sure he’ll have a stock pile of it somewhere. He was always the man to hide things away behind locked doors while judging others for doing the same.

Quinn was quick, she rummaged quickly though the drawers trying to leave most things as she found it before she found a cold hard stack of cash somewhere near the back. Quinn didn’t hesitate to steal it. Didn’t care in the slightest.

They left that house as quick as they could.

Quinn was fairly certain her parents hadn’t stepped a single foot into her room since she left. It still looked just the same as it had the night she was kicked out.

They would surely not notice the soft blanket Quinn had stolen, the few books on her shelf she hadn’t the room to carry or the framed picture on the wall of Quinn, Santana and Brittany from years ago.

Quinn was making a new life now, whether she wanted to or not. But she’d be damned if she’d let her parents take another thing from her.

Quinn brought brand new dresses and maternity clothes with the stolen money. A part of her revelling in the fact that her father was secretly paying in some way for the bastard child he hated so much.

Quinn was back in that room now, of course. A place she had never expected to return to again. It was just as cold and empty as it had been that morning they’d broken in.

Her mother never mentioned if she noticed it. If her father had ever mentioned finding Quinn’s passport missing or that stack of cash gone from his desk.

Quinn had never felt a shred of guilt in her for that.

It was a few months after Quinn had moved back into her old room before she returned for a night to Santana’s house. There would always be a room there for her. There had been long before she had fallen pregnant. It had been a long running joke amongst Santana’s parents – Santana and Brittany always found themselves in Santana’s double bed and Quinn always found herself in the spare room across the hall.

The night she moved in after she’d been kicked out they had hugged her tight and said though stifled laughter that they’d practically renamed the guest room into _Quinn’s room_ a long time ago.

It was so different at Santana’s. And as she sat around the dinner table she couldn’t help but see the life she’d imagined here. The life they had offered her. Offered her and Beth.

She could have been here with her daughter.

But she hadn’t chosen that future.

She was here again and the halls did not echo with her child’s tears or laughter. For better or worse they were silent.

The gentle clinking of knives and forks and the always welcoming conversations of Santana and her parents. Never pushing. But being there. And It felt like a cool salve on the ache inside her. If only a little.

Puck decided to throw a pool party to celebrate something. He claimed it wasn’t in relation to Quinn’s utter smack down of Karofsky in the corridor earlier that week but he couldn’t think of a different reason to verbalise.

The glee club all attended in varying shades of bright toggs.

Quinn had a silence to her that the others hadn’t yet figured out how to deal with. She was content to be left _alone_ floating on an inflatable shaped like a flip flop with a drink in hand.

The weight of what was missing weighting down on her like a new kind of gravity. The last time she had seen those people her baby had still been inside her and this future could still have been avoided.

Quinn with the flat tummy and the angry, empty eyes did not speak to anyone.

Santana and Brittany were pretty good at running interference. Meaning they were great at actually having fun with the glee club, for instance playing an extremely competitive game of chicken in the pool while Quinn silently floated around them.

Quinn got absolutely smashed. But very quietly. Not the raging drunk that called too much _stop drinking_ attention to herself.

Quinn did claw her way up and out of the pool at one point though, at least 4 drinks in.

Santana saw Quinn disappear behind the house and didn’t attempt to follow her after she saw Puck carefully follow her dripping footsteps. Instead she started another loud, distracting game of tag in the pool. Almost drowning Rachel in the process, but sacrifices must be made.

No one found them hugging tightly. A grief around them the others couldn’t hope to understand. Quinn sobbed into his shirt, letting out more tears than she had In weeks. Puck held her tight, a few quiet tears of his own winding their way down his cheeks.

It was too much to feel all the time, all their emotions. But it was so much. Sometimes it just had to be felt. All the raw ocean waves inside them that howled and screamed and ached.

_They had given up their baby._

They sat behind the house for a while. Quinn chugged another can of beer. Puck didn’t try to stop her. He downed a few drinks too. Catching up. Crushing the cans into the grass beside them.

There was no words. But it felt right, paying for a moment alone together. Feeling the grief between them. Letting themselves show it for once on their faces.

They didn’t love each other, not like that. They wouldn’t get together again. They hadn’t been for each other like that. They had made Beth together… but that was that. They would always love each other, in a way. But it was love that felt like holding broken glass.

They actually both found it hard sometimes. Looking at each other.

Quinn could just see the bits of Puck she had briefly seen in Beth’s face.

All Puck could see was another tiny Quinn. All blonde hair and green eyes.

It felt like swallowing burning coals sometimes. Glancing at each other across the halls. Seeing each other’s face in glee club in a dance number. But sometimes it felt good to hurt. To stare into the face that was half their child. To feel that cold and familiar knife slip between their ribs and steal away their breath.

Quinn spent the rest of that party with her sunglasses unmovable on her face, watching her friends be ridiculous in the pool.

It was hard sometimes… realising that they were all still the same age. There was the true teenagers before her. She could see it in the way they played. The way they laughed.

Quinn felt so old.

Beth was in someone else’s arms, existing far away from her. Quinn was in one empty world… and Beth was in another. Somewhere bright and glistening and warm.

Quinn had seen the look on Shelby’s face as she beheld Quinn’s daughter. It had been with so much awe, so much love… so much tenderness.

Shelby had money. Shelby had a career. Shelby had a home…

Shelby had the ability to do right by her daughter.

Raising a new Quinn Fabray in miniature in a happy home.

It makes Quinn wonder how Beth will turn out. Imagining a kid who looks just like her with none of the coldness in her eyes.

Quinn learned from a young age how to be and how not to be in the household of her father. She had always known that his love was conditional. Was breakable. Was something she could lose. And it had shaped how Quinn had been. Who she had become.

She had been a ruthless head cheerleader. She had learnt that first and foremost from her family.

It makes Quinn feel like her insides are full of glass when she pictures it. A future endless years away from now… of a girl who looks just like Quinn entering high school.

She hopes Beth is kind. She hopes she is nothing like her. How Quinn had been in the _before._ That other life that felt like it had been years ago.

She hopes Beth didn’t have to lose absolutely everything to realise she didn’t have to exist in the image of her father. She didn’t have to be cruel. She didn’t have to hurt. Didn’t have to be hard and unflinching and cold.

It had taken Quinn’s whole world to be set on fire for her to change her priorities.

To change her room. Her clothes. To treat Cheerio’s practise as just another after school activity and not the thing that would make or break her should she fail.

To let herself enjoy glee. Truly. Properly. Free.

But what a cost.

Quinn knew she had made the right choice. A 17 year old kid like her had no idea how to look after herself let alone a living, human baby.

Quinn hoped she had made the right choice.

That this pain and ache and agony inside her was the cost for her daughter to truly have a better life than the one Quinn could have given her.

But no matter what, if Quinn had made the right choice or not. Something had changed in the way that Quinn sang.

She’d only done a few solo songs the year before when she was a Cheerio, and then when she was pregnant. But recently Mr. Schue had taken it upon himself to spread the spotlight a little more equally each week.

Everyone brought something that was uniquely theirs to each song and solo… Rachel had a way of lighting every song on fire, making every word seem like they were hers and hers alone. Like she had written the song, and it was pouring from the wellspring of her heart in the heat of the moment.

Santana and Brittany brought a flirty, electric, athletic energy to all their performances. While Santana belted out the words in her smoky, perfect voice, Brittany harmonised and danced like wildfire with glee and passion in every move they shared.

But Quinn… Quinn brought pain and anger. There was a bite to her words, an endless silent scream. A storm in her eyes that flashed with lightening, all her moves bursting with it. An impossible amount of grief. A hot and aching wound inside her that seem to stain her teeth red with blood. It seemed to pour from her fingers.

Oh Quinn was so, so sad.

It felt like everybody forgot sometimes.

That Quinn had a daughter.

She wasn’t just _Quinn_ anymore. She had a real, breathing kid out there in the world. Growing up in _someone else’s_ arms.

But sometimes Quinn thinks Rachel understands. Rachel sometimes got this long, sad look in her eyes. Like an ocean of grief and possibility was weighting her down and lapping against her ribs. 

Because Rachel had been replaced by a brand new, perfect thing.

Her own mother had left her here in Lima, as she chased her dreams in the big city. New York and a new baby.

Shelby hadn’t just left Quinn out of her baby’s life. She’d left Rachel out. Her own daughter.

They understand each other more than perhaps anyone else can.

Scars from the same fire. Quinn’s whole life had gone up in smoke, not a trace of her soul had been left untouched.

Rachel had some of that smoke curling in her lungs. Quinn didn’t know how much it hurt, but she knew that it did. Some of her solos were like coughing up ash after all.

Quinn’s baby was gone and she was never coming back. Quinn didn’t even have the pain or salvation of photographs. How Beth might be growing up was just in her head. And it was in her head.

She couldn’t stop imagining it. As the year went on, every day, the knowledge painful and endless that her little girl was surely not the same one now that she had held in that hospital. Enough time and weeks and days had passed that Beth must surely have changed. Have grown up even just a bit.

Quinn thought about her eyes when she was in Cheerio’s practice. As her arms trembled above her. As the sky flicked them with spitting rain. Quinn tried to recall them perfectly, what she had seen in them for those few, short minutes.

They had been so like her own. Green and Hazel.

A mini Quinn in her arms.

Quinn almost called her Lucy. Beth - Lucy - _not Fabray._

Just so there was a tiny piece of Quinn there, in her name.

But she hadn’t. She’d wiped that thought away just as she had wiped away her part in Beth’s life. She wasn’t hers. Not anymore. She couldn’t lay claim to her like that.

Even though it felt like there was a knife between her ribs.

Because Beth was living and being loved.

And Quinn felt like she was still burning.

Cheerio’s would end, and so would Glee and her classes… just as they always did. And everyone would return back to their lives. The thing that waited for them always, beyond the hours they were at school. Calling them back to homes and rooms and dreams.

But as everything ended, as it always must. Quinn just couldn’t stop running. As everyone left. As afterschool clubs or sports ended. Quinn didn’t. Quinn _couldn’t._

She had nothing worth going home for. Nothing to come back to. An empty house and a vacant mother. A bright pink room with angry brush strokes. Those old baby doll dresses that she brought because of _Beth_ that she’d shoved under her bed in a box. Trying to let them be forgotten. Burning a hole in her memory instead. Always right there. That box from a different life, where her future hadn’t always looked like this.

She swapped her clothes out for her short McKinley athletics shorts and shirt and she _ran._ It was like Cheerio’s was never hard enough. Never made her hurt enough. Didn’t make her _break_ enough.

Nothing she did ever seemed to erase the memories in her head. She could never forget what she had done. What she had given up.

Glee was fun and it let something breathe in her soul singing like that… but it wasn’t _long_ enough. Wasn’t all consuming enough. Not like it was for Rachel. For her it kept her going, her desire to win lasted long after glee and classes ended and she went home.

But all Quinn found as each bell rang and the day ended was silence and sorrow ringing in her head.

The least she could do with it was run.

She was getting fitter. Reclaiming a body that was something like it had been once, in the before. Before Beth. Before that night when she’d had too many drinks and someone was paying her even the slightest bit of attention.

_You’re not fat._ He’d told her. All he’d needed to tell her.

All the attention she received now… just seemed to hurt. Like everybody that wasn’t Beth was a twisting the knife that lived between her ribs. No matter how much they cared… or didn’t.

But still, it didn’t stop Santana and Brittany. It never would.

Quinn fell asleep on Santana’s sofa one night after classes, glee and _running._ They’d watched a movie all together. Something fun and sweet and familiar. Brittany and Santana on either side of Quinn like the padded walls of her cell. Keeping her safe. Keeping her from hurting herself. Running herself ragged on the track of McKinley high school.

Brittany kept playing with Quinn’s hair. Lulling her further into a peaceful sleep. Hopefully into the arms of kind dreams.

It was almost familiar, the scene before Santana. Almost. Quinn had fallen asleep here so often last year, when her body was heavy and tired under the weight of her baby.

Santana can almost see the scene in front of her. Quinn, asleep. A blanket strewn across her legs and her hand splayed ever more across her round stomach.

Oh Quinn had looked so tired then too, but there had been a sort of peace to her in those moments. As her baby grew inside her and she kept her from harm. 

The scar on Quinn’s cheek had been fresher then. A shining red slice through her skin just under her eye. What that awful man had done to her. How hard he had slapped his own daughter across the face when he had found out about the baby.

Santana will never forget that sight, not for as long as she lives. Of Quinn in her car, pulled over on the side of nowhere. With a tear stained face and blood pouring from her cheek.

Santana’s heart had just stopped. She had climbed into the passenger seat, her jacket wet with rain and simply held her. She could still feel Quinn’s trembling body under her hands. Still see the blood that blossomed on Santana’s shoulder as Quinn cried.

Her father’s ring across her face deep enough to cut. To scab over and scar. _His love wasn’t enough_ written right across Quinn’s face.

That had been the night that everything changed. The smoke from that fire still lingered. Still hovered in the ruins of Quinn’s life.

As she slept now, that scar was faded.

But the memory was as fresh as if it happened yesterday. It hadn’t healed for Quinn. It still hurt and bled and ached.

But she was asleep, for now at least.

Quinn skipped school the Friday before Regionals. She completely dropped off the map for four, long days.

Regionals was on Thursday of the following week. Everyone was full of the electric buzz that came as a competition dawned. Especially this one.

Everyone but Quinn.

Quinn had a gnawing, growing, empty dread inside of her. It had been there all year of course… but she had been living with it.

Sectionals had come and gone and with it Quinn had felt her body shake as she took those steps up to that stage. It remembered, while she tried not to.

But Regionals… came with its own spectacular doom.

Quinn couldn’t tell you why the show choir competition dates changed every year, she didn’t care what kind of unorganised middle aged messes ran the show behind the scenes.

The only thing Quinn noticed. Couldn’t possibly ever not notice. Was that Regionals was a week later than it had been last year.

It was the penultimate stop on the road. The second to last hurrah. The last gate to breach before they earned their chance at that elusive National’s trophy.

It was also coming up to mark one year since Quinn gave Beth up. Gave birth and then gave her away.

The Friday before Regionals marked Beth’s first birthday.

And Quinn completely disappeared.

She grabbed a few of her things, enough spare clothes to last whatever storm she was about to unleash. That soft yellow blanket she’d always wrapped around her shoulders at Santana’s house. The one she’d broken back into her old home to get. She hid herself behind a hat that she pulled low over her eyes, a warm oversized hoodie and her new sturdy leather jacket.

She got into her car, that same red beetle she’d had since she turned 16.

Quinn didn’t know where she was driving, only that it had to be further and further with each passing minute.

She doubted Shelby was even awake yet.

Quinn had barely slept, the tension in her body never truly giving way to dreams. She’d thrown her blankets off her as the clock ticked slowly to 5am and simply given up.

Her mother wouldn’t be awake for hours. No one would.

If anyone remembered what day it was at all.

Quinn didn’t bother sneaking around the house. Her mother slept like the dead after she drank. And boy did she drink.

At least there was something to be gained. Quinn didn’t even have to pick the lock on the alcohol cabinet, it’s door was wide open. The bottles clinked together softly as she gently pushed her hand past her mother’s varying wines and got to what her dad had left behind.

She pulled the bottle of whiskey that had been sealed, prize of place since Quinn could remember and another bottle full of vodka.

Today was not going to be a day for sobriety.

Quinn didn’t exactly care what happened after that.

And then Quinn drove. Her backpack on the passenger seat badly packed with alcohol, clothes and that one solitary photograph she ever got of her daughter.

She didn’t know where she was going, but it took her hours to get there. As the dark night sky slowly changed its canvas to the early morning sun. Quinn watched it rise and tried not to imagine her sleeping daughters face.

One year old.

One year away from Quinn.

Quinn had felt like she was on the precipice of collapse all year. Like one more thing would just make her _snap._ Send her so dark down the hole she was slipping that she’d never be able to get out.

She tried to hold it together. Tried to heal that hole inside her stomach. She’d gone back to school, those hallways full of whispers. She’d passed her tests. She’d written meaningless reports. And Quinn had _run._

She had been the steel backed spine of the pyramid that had taken the Cheerio’s team to another Regional Championship. She’d held it so strong and so unyielding, so uncaring as her body burned and hurt beneath her she’d even managed to get Coach Sylvester to call her Q again.

That ancient term of affection that belonged to someone else. Quinn hadn’t been able to find even find a piece of her that cared.

She couldn’t get over the overwhelming feeling that _nothing mattered._

Quinn’s only good deed, only good creation was her daughter and giving her daughter up. It felt like she had reached the end of a road and didn’t know where to turn to from here.

Maybe one day Quinn wouldn’t feel quite so much like her insides had been crushed, broken and stomped on by the universe and her choices. But it would certainly not stop hurting today.

Quinn pulled in at a service station as the sun crossed the boundary of the dawn and peeked above the trees lining the highway.

There was a tiny convenience store attached to the petrol station, besides the behemoth fast food place Quinn was surely going to next.

She made sure her fake I.D was in her pocket and slipped her aviator sunglasses over her eyes before she parked her car, filled it up with petrol and walked into the blindingly bright shop.

She was unhurried but not with the careful air of attention to detail. Quinn felt like a slowed down hurricane. Barely glancing at what she had chosen before shoving it into her basket. She grabbed whatever she could barely think she might need.

Water, snacks, chocolate biscuits, a brand new pack of cigarettes and a cheap plastic lighter. Quinn pushed her fake I.D over the counter and the server didn’t even bat an eye. Quinn paid on the credit card that she had traded her daughter for.

Not that her mother would ever notice.

Quinn had always looked older than she was. Now 17, she easily passed as 21. Well, if not her face, her eyes certainly did. The echoing sadness in them. The air around Quinn that surely must have been earned across the years. The heavy weight in the air of choices unknown but stifling.

Also her fake I.D had been precured by Santana. It hadn’t yet failed her and It didn’t today. Quinn pocketed the cigarettes and slipped the plastic bag off the counter.

Quinn threw her purchases into her backpack and drove through the drive in of the bright fast food place next door. Now was not the time to sit and stare and stay.

Quinn ordered a double bacon cheeseburger combo with fries, an obscenely large milkshake and a scalding hot cup of coffee. If Quinn was going down a pit of despair today, she might as well do it with a double bacon cheeseburger inside of her. 

Quinn pulled off on the first detour from the highway after that. Following the winding road away from the cars containing the people that were starting to head to work the earliest. She followed the road, taking each choice that took her further into the middle of nowhere with each left or right turn. Fishing the coffee from the cup holder she drank more and more with each slow turn of her tires along the gravel.

Her cheeseburger was still warm, but barely, by the time she pulled up as far as the road could take her. Quinn suspected she was deep into some farmland. The track or trail that ended at the road, started up again between the trees of the forest. She pulled her car up onto the last specs of gravel before the forest overtook them. Hiding her bright red car in the shade of the woods.

Here was good. Far beyond that shitty awful town she was trapped in constantly. No one would think to look for her here. Quinn hadn’t even known where she was going to end up until she got here after all.

She was well and proper lost. A good day for it.

The only day for it really.

It was almost time for school to start. The clock was creeping up to 9am on her dashboard. Quinn had a whole, endless day to fill. To blank out and forget.

Beth must surely be awake by now. Somewhere between the sun rising over those trees and Quinn arriving here… she will have opened her eyes.

Shelby would have woken up by now too… attending to Quinn’s daughters every need. Doing something worthy to celebrate her baby turning one year old.

Quinn wonders what they will do today. If Shelby will even spare a thought to her.

She had taken Quinn’s baby just like that. No backup plan. No look back. No hand on Quinn’s arm as she promised she would get to visit her daughter.

She had simply taken her. Their signatures on the legal forms barely dry before that was that. Shelby had left with _Quinn’s daughter_ and left Quinn all by herself.

In the long, painful year since, Quinn hadn’t heard from her. It hadn’t officially been an open adoption. It had just been an adoption. Quinn had given up her legal right to be Beth’s mother… and that is all Shelby needed her to do.

Not even a picture.

Quinn couldn’t stand it anymore. The thoughts inside her head. Who knows what she would have done if she actually knew where Shelby lived. What her number was… what they were doing.

But she didn’t. All she had was the pristine bottle of whisky had dad had kept around like a prized horse on display all these years.

She didn’t know what occasion he’d been waiting for. Perhaps when Quinn walked across an ivy league stage and got a degree. He’d always wanted her to be a lawyer. Have that white picket fence life.

She’d blown that dream up in his face of course, the night he found out she was pregnant. He’d used the rage of it, that lost child in his head, to strike across her face.

Quinn flipped down the mirror on the sun visor and peered at it. It still stood out against her pale skin. A deep slash across her cheek, right under her eye.

Quinn had paid a lot for her daughter… and would continue to do so for the rest of her life. She’d lost a certain dream of her future too. Not the same one as her father of course… but a dream all the same.

She’d never thought she could be this sad and be this young. She never thought she’d already have lost this much by the time she turned 17.

Quinn reached into her backpack and pulled out the brown paper bag containing her burger and fries. She unwrapped it on her lap, pushing a fry between her teeth.

Quinn would never walk across that stage of that perfect life. Whatever her father had been waiting for would never come to pass. Quinn could get all the degrees she wanted, she could get into Harvard or Oxford or Yale… but she’d already broken the version of Quinn that would ever merit this whiskey, into pieces.

That version of Quinn’s life was gone. That Quinn was gone too.

But today was a day worth this bottle. If anything could hope to match the unbearable amount of feelings in Quinn’s chest, it would be this. Today meant _so much,_ and it hurt _so much._

Beth was turning one year old.

Quinn could think of nothing else worth saving this bottle for.

Her daughter’s first birthday.

Quinn was nowhere near to hold her in her arms.

Quinn broke the melted wax cap off the whiskey with a derisive twist of her hand. She made a mock salute in the air, an echo of the toast that might have been given once.

“Happy Birthday Beth,” Quinn said quietly, under only the watchful eyes of the trees. “I hope you’re happy.” Quinn closed her eyes for a moment, stuck in a wish. “I really hope I made the right choice…” Her voice broke, ever quieter, “that it was worth all this…” She took a shuddering, last breath, feeling hot tears spill from her eyes down her cheeks. Running a track through that shiny pink scar. “I love you Beth. I hope you learn that, someday. Just how much.”

It was all the words Quinn had inside her to convey the great bleeding dark pit inside her stomach. The shards of glass in her throat whenever she saw Puck’s face. The sadness and echoing emptiness that pushed her ever onward in Cheerio’s practice. The unending fuel for her to run, that have given her back her strong legs and toned stomach. The raw sharp pain in her voice when she sang. The desperate embrace she craved that she found only in her dreams. Where she got to hold her child again in the hours she fell asleep with that yellow blanket in her arms, before she woke to a familiar dark. A familiar emptiness.

Quinn put the bottle between her teeth and drank. The whisky biting her throat, hot and burning and taking her breath away. It was like drinking gasoline. Or fire. She coughed as she pulled the bottle away. Screwing the cap back on and tucking it between her legs.

Quinn ate her burger in the light of the rising sun and listened to the music pouring from her headphones.

When she was finished, she put that solitary photo of her and Beth up on the dashboard. The only photo that had ever been taken of the two of them.

It might be the _only_ photo that there ever was of the two of them.

With that thought, and another swig of burning whiskey, Quinn fished the packet of cigarettes out of her pocket.

Some days she just needed to hurt. Needed to feel the burning from the fire that had lit her whole life up in smoke.

Quinn felt like she was still stuck in it. That skin melting heat. At least with a cigarette between her lips her lungs matched how she felt on the inside. Like there was finally some proof it was all real, that it had all actually happened.

She propped the car door open with her foot as she smoked. Watching the burning tip of the cigarette drop ash to the gravel below the tires.

Quinn turned up the volume on her music as she drank, until she could barely make out the words. She couldn’t think about it.

That other life she might have had.

The one where she kept her daughter.

This was her lot now.

And Quinn had a whole day to dedicate to the storm raging inside her head. To both honour and forget her daughter as the world got blurrier.

Just like everyone else seemed too.

**Author's Note:**

> Ahh Quinn, so full of trauma.  
> Please flick me a comment, what do you think?


End file.
